It's not us; it's the weather

If you are a frequent flier, you already know the gist of this nice article by the BBC: that airlines are allowed to sandbag the flight durations. A flight that takes 60 minutes will be portrayed to fliers as taking twice as long, if not longer.

The airlines are even allowed to lie about this practice. When your flight is delayed taking off, the captain claims that s/he will “make up for the delay,” as if the plane could be driven faster on command. (Were they deliberately going slower before?) The truth is that the schedule is padded, so that it can absorb a limited amount of delay.

This quote sums the situation up: “By padding, airlines are gaming the system to fool you.”

At the very bottom of the article, you’d find the potential motivation – to avoid compensating travelers for long delays, as required by law in some countries.

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The situation here is similar to the road congestion problem discussed in Chapter 1 of Numbers Rule Your World (link). Managing perceived time is as important as managing actual time experienced by the traveler. Of course, reducing actual wasted time is preferred, especially to scientists working on the problem, but when the road/sky capacity is fixed and over-subscribed, it’s almost impossible to attain. The second half of the article addresses “why don’t the airlines work on efficiency instead of lengthening flight times?”

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Another quote reveals: “Over 30% of all flights arrive more than 15 minutes late every day despite padding.”

The “on-time arrival rate” blessed by the Department of Transportation (DoT) is not what you think it is.

Let’s take a random flight that takes 60 minutes. This flight schedule might be padded and advertised as departing at 2 pm and arriving at 4 pm.

If the flight departs at 2 pm and takes 60 minutes, then you’d think on-time arrival is defined as arriving at 3 pm. You might agree to allow for some slack, say, 15 minutes. In this case, on-time arrival is arriving before 3:15 pm.

Given the discussion, you now know that on-time arrival is actually arriving before 4 pm since the schedule is padded not by 15 minutes but by 60 minutes.

And then you’d be wrong! Because there is padding upon padding. Airlines are allowed to claim “on-time arrival” if the flights arrive within 15 minutes of the scheduled arrival time, which in our example, has been padded by 60 minutes. So any flight arriving before 4:15 pm is counted as “on-time.”

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Padding is not purely a bad thing. A certain amount of padding is necessary because lots of flights are vying for a limited amount of airport and air space. A padded schedule is a more accurate schedule. It acknowledges other factors that cause delays in arrival.

The gaming of the padded metric is what works people up. Gaming is possible because padding inserts subjectivity into the measurement. So long as subjectivity cannot be avoided, gaming is here to stay.

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The reporter said airlines have spent billions on technologies to improve efficiency, i.e., managing actual experienced time. But, “this has not moved the needle on delays, which are stubbornly stuck at 30%.”

Now square that statement with this one: “Billions of dollars in investment [in modernising air traffic control] have in fact halved air traffic control-caused delays since 2007 while airline-caused delays have soared.”

Does this sound like the new technologies have successfully reclassified delays from air traffic control caused to airline caused? Passing the buck?

The next time your flight is delayed, the airlines will likely tell you, “it’s not us, it’s the weather.”